To my mind, Ian Carandang is the foremost artisan ice cream maker in the country.

He started his ice cream business, Sebastian’s, at roughly the same time I started Dessert Comes First. And in the six years since, I’ve chronicled his rise and contributed my input along the way. Ian is one of DCF’s most loyal, ardent fans, and I paid him homage last March when I wrote the cover story about him for F&B World magazine. He makes some of my favorite ice cream flavors and I’m proud to have him as a food purveyor at the Dessert Comes First Christmas Gift List.

Ian is serving an extra special line-up at the event: five different flavors that are a holiday mix of seasonal favorites, his most popular flavors – what he calls “my greatest hits”, this year’s shining stars, and most exciting of all, a new flavor making its debut at the event.

Queso de Bola (QDB) was released two Christmases ago and it’s something people start looking for as the holidays approach. It’s cheese ice cream lavished with shards and shreds of queso de bola, the sharp ball-cheese that no Filipino Christmas is without. Ian tells me that this is a knock-out flavor to christen the top of a hot bibingka. Putting that now on my Christmas to-eat list.

Many people consider Ian’s blue cheese ice cream, Once In A Blue Moon, his bold breakout flavor. Inspired by a savory Gorgonzola cheesecake that he saw on an episode of Top Chef, creating a savory flavor to make a dessert appealed to the artist in him. Chunks of blue cheese crumble and tumble into cheese ice cream and are anointed with Palawan honey and a smattering of roasted and chopped walnuts. This is a love-it-or-hate-it flavor (I love it) and the reception to this flavor has been nothing less than phenomenal.

You might say that Ian’s Sapin-Sapin ice cream looks like the result of a mad scientist gone wild in his lab but it’s really the proud culmination of what Ian describes as “…years of trial and error [in] trying to make a rice-based ice cream that pays tribute to kakanins, one of our few truly indigenous desserts.” Ian is fiercely nationalistic and his line of native flavors
pays tribute to that.

This motley of four flavors is made with coconut cream, pandan, langka, and ube kakanin ice creams twirled together and scattered with homemade latik, freshly-grated coconut that’s been squeezed and fried. So off-the-wall in looks and taste that Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist-chef Reggie Aspiras wrote about it in her column recently, further precipitating demand for this proud Filipino flavor.

“I should take a picture of you eating that,” Ian says, much amused. He’s watching me scoop up and spoon up my first taste of Snack Attack, a flavor that’s been flying out of the freezers this year. My eyes are closed and I’m making involuntary little sighs. Wretched excess is embodied here where everything but the kitchen sink seems to have been thrown into it, and in such a wickedly addicting way.

Vanilla ice cream, is the rather benign bed at which a series of ingredients rush headlong into and all homemade too: chocolate-covered potato chips, peanut butter-coated pretzels, and honey-roasted peanuts — a riot wrapped in a salted butter caramel swirl. Oy.

The NYC Special (also see cover photo) has the distinction of debuting at the Dessert Comes First Christmas Gift List. Ian’s paean to a similar ice cream he tried while on a trip to New York, this flavor requires faith and an adventurous spirit. Consider vanilla bean ice cream speckled with (vanilla) seeds, sprinkled with sea salt and yes, drizzled with a carefully chosen, fruity olive oil. Ian explains how all the components work. “The olive oil provides the richness in the same way a chocolate sauce would and the salt acts as a beautiful counterbalance to counteract cloy.”

Comments

This makes me want to head out and get Sebastian’s ice cream. I’ll make it a point to try all these flavors before I head back to the US by the end of the year. Oh, the anticipation of sugar rush… and sugar crash.

I first tasted ice cream with olive oil in SFO (Bi-rite, by Dolores Park, never without a long line). Little weird at first, but it works! You should try it, Lori, if you find yourself in the Bay Area again (Fenton’s too, the ice cream place in the movie UP)

Can I be your assistant taste-tester for future Sebastian ice cream endeavors? 🙂

Lori, Can you please convince Ian to come back to the south???? If not possible, please convince him to bring back Birthday Cake ice cream!!! He really made that so well (and so good!!). Please? Ian, You don’t know me, but I have been a fan. I even tried to muster up some courage to beg you to bring back Birthday Cake when I was lining up behind you in a cupcake shop (years ago!).

I love Sebastian’s Lori! Agree with this statement 100%: “the foremost artisan ice cream maker in the country”. I think my experience with Sebastian’s was the first food-related post I wrote on my blog, too.

I got hooked when I got introduced to their cheesecake flavor, but I became a die-hard fan – and an unofficial endorser! – when I tasted Once in a Blue Moon. Blue cheese AND ice cream? Love. It.

I do believe this is the first time Ian’s been featured in any of your events! But I’m thrilled he’s making up for that by providing five different flavors, including two I haven’t yet tried! WHEEEE!!! 😀

I remember the year I gave Ian a kilo of hazelnuts and he made a belgian chocolate hazelnut ice cream as my birthday gift to a friend.
Ian, if you ever consider expanding to an international market (ie, China) please please let me know, because ice cream here blows.
That blue cheese ice cream and the NYC flavor looks divine. I had olive oil gelato at Mozza a month ago and I love the flavor.

Yahoo! Okay! Please PM me on how to go about ordering. Now that I live in the south, I go to ATC (but that’s gone. : ( ). When I was still working in Ortigas, I went to Podium (your 1st salesgirl there knows me by face. I think she was eventually assigned in MoA?). When I was assigned in Pasay, I went to MoA. See, I follow you everywhere. : )

OH. MY. This post is FOOD PORN. That NYC Dream echoes what they’re doing with dessert in Spain — adding flakes of sea salt and olive oil. I had one with balls of creamy chocolate and wafer. It was out of this world!! Can’t wait to try this.

But Lori it does. Oils work wonderfully with ice creams with mild flavors. I am still waiting for Ian to make something out of the oil I gave him last month (and it isn’t olive oil). A good Balsamico also works….